Category: Misc gadgets

Switch view

The LG-made Google Nexus 4 is one of the hottest names on the market right now, but its wireless charging capabilities have been somewhat neglected due to the lack of cool charging stations. The good news for those of you who have purchased a Nexus and are waiting for its charging orb is that it is already s up for pre-order.

Microsoft had an interesting final quarter for 2012 – the three months period that saw the launches of both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. As a result, the company is reporting record revenues but also a slight decline in operating income.

Sales of Windows saw a 24% increase from the year ago quarter, but the Windows 8 launch is behind the Windows 7 launch, which boosted sales by 76%. Even Vista brought a 65% jump in sales, though in terms of monetary value the Windows 8 launch brought in more cash (Vista replaced 5 year old XP, while Windows 7 is still relatively recent). Read more »

Have you ever dreamed of taking sneaky pictures or videos from your iPhone or iPad? Well, iHelicopters have made things simpler for you with its iSpy Tank, a sneaky camera gadget which adds a whole new dimension for taking real time pictures and videos right from your iDevices.

The iSpy Tank has a camera which hooks up to your iPhone or iPad through a WiFi connection and let’s you remotely control it. Read more »

Remember the Charging orb accessory for the Nexus 4, which was supposed to let you charge your Google phone in wireless style? It was announced and then it all but disappeared. It might finally make it to market though – Norwegian site DustinHome.no has it on pre-order.

Huawei announced the Ascend D quad at last year’s CES and said it uses a homebrewed chipset, the K3V2. While the phone never got a proper release, the company has a successor to the chipset in the works.

It’s called the HiSilicon K3V3 and might (or might not) be used in their two new quad-core devices, the Ascend Mate and Ascend D2. Read more »

The new Xperia Z has a cool angular design and Sony will be releasing a matching angular dock for it. The DK26 charging dock uses the two exposed pogo pins on the phone to charge it but that’s about all it does.

The port doesn’t extend the MHL USB port, it’s just for charging. Read more »

With the big ticket items out of the way, we can turn our attention to the other gadgets that Sony has brought to CES. The company has a new range of four NFC-equipped speakers to work with the One-Touch tech that Sony introduced with the new Sony Xperia Z and Xperia ZL smartphones.

There’s also a voice-controlled remote for Sony’s Google TV box, the NSZ-GS7. Read more »

The official dock for the Google Nexus 7 tablet was first announced in early August last year, but we’ve barely heard from it since (the Asus Japan site has it listed, but it’s currently out of stock). So, here’s some good news – B&H Photo Video has the dock listed on their site as coming soon.

The Nexus 7 dock features a microUSB port used for charging and data connectivity along with a 3.5mm audio jack to plug in external speakers. Read more »

Samsung has made a couple of attempts to integrate a pico projector into a phone, but if you those are not to your liking, the company has started making a separate projector accessory too. The Mobile Beam Projector is about the same size as a Galaxy S III and can be hooked up to a smartphone, laptop, media player – anything with MHL or HDMI out really.

The projector measures 116 x 60.4 x 12.2mm and weighs 108g, making it reasonably pocketable. It projects an image with nHD (640 x 360) resolution at up to 20 lumen brightness (15 lumen in normal operation). That’s comparable to what the Galaxy Beam has. Read more »

Samsung released a 13 minute-long walkthrough for its Galaxy Camera Android-powered digicam. It’s really worth it if you don’t have a store with a demo unit, but you are considering getting the device.

In case you need a refresh, the Galaxy Camera features a similar hardware to the Galaxy S III flagship smartphone (4.8” LCD HD screen, a quad-core 1.4GHz processor, Mali-400MP GPU, 1GB RAM) and runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Read more »

There’s been a worrying trend of smartphones and tablets having very little on-board storage and no memory card slots, so this comes as a bit of good news – Samsung has already started production of new embedded memory chips for mobile devices with 64GB capacity.

The chips are built on a 10nm process and are 20% smaller than current chips, while offering 30% better performance compared to Samsung’s older models (“older” here means from five months ago). Read more »

Apple’s event brought things like a refreshed retina iPad, the long expected iPad mini and new Mac computers. There were new accessories too – several new Lightning cables (HDMI, VGA, SD and USB) and a Smart Cover for the iPad mini.

The iPad mini covers are smaller versions of the ones for the full-size iPad and they have the same functionality – automatically waking the tablet when you open them and then serving as stands (in two different positions). Here’s a video that shows it in action: Read more »